January 2007

More on this later, but I just wanted to post a few extra images of Telstra's Second Life island that we obtained.

While I'm a fan of Second Life (as a conceptual platform), I realise that it's a bit out there to most people. I sometimes wonder what Australian companies and organisations think is the actual size of the Australia population inside SL that they are dealing with/appealing to?

Must be pretty small. More great insights after some sleep. Photos are below and the story is here.

I have no first-hand experience of Vista. Everything I know about it comes from things I read and I have to say I'm not thrilled by much of what I read.

But I do know this: upgrading your existing computer to Vista appears to be as smart as putting a V8 engine in a Trabant (my favourite German marque). That is unless you already own a very "muscular" computer and have the time, patience and skill to carry out such a transplant. My advice: do not attempt this at home.

Google's Australia Day flyover was a great idea. Sure it was probably a belated response to Microsoft's "Look Up and Smile" campaign which was tied in with the official Australia Day celebrations. But it had the potential to be more spontaneous and grass rootsy than the carefully planned and orchestrated Microsoft event.

I went out this morning to see if anyone was doing things for the Google flyover - an attempt by Google to stir up even more interest in the Google Maps site by giving Sydneysiders advance notice that high resolution photos would be taken over Sydney between 8.30am and 2.30pm today, Australia Day.

I went to Queens Park in Waverley, near where I live, and my colleague Asher went down to Bondi Beach, near where he lives. We each came back with a swag of photos and tales but the best one was the story of Aaron Schwebel and IT worker from Wollongong (about 90 minutes drive south of Sydney) who came up to put down a sign to show his estranged wife Karen that he still loves her.

I was just watching the second set in the Federer-Robredo quarter-final at the Australian Open and it made me think: I should have explained what it's like to watch a match through the eyes of a player - which I did last week in Second Life.

For those who haven't heard, Second Life is a a virtual world. It's become a bit of a laboratory for companies to see what it takes to make it in a make-believe ecosystem. One of those companies is IBM - Big Blue as it used to be called in the old days when it dominated the tech industry through its mainframe computers.

Google Maps and its sister product Google Earth have developed a widespread following largely on the back of enthusiastic amateur geographers and satellite/aerial imagery buffs who pore over the photos and pick out interesting stuff - like hovering cars, anthropomorphic rock formations or people just soaking up the rays.

There's been the odd rumour that Google deliberately plants "easter eggs" in the imagery to fuel the search and help virally spreading the findings, but frankly I don't buy that. There's enough naturally occurring oddities around to keep the spotters busy for years. Just check out the Keyhole Community pages.

Skype has announced that they're going to making one of their fee-based plans available in Australia. They're talking about one with a monthly fee of about $8 and six or seven cents a call to any fixed line or mobile number within the country.

There's other VoIP providers around offering similar services, of course. But Skype is the big guy in the area and I'm sure it's going to look very attractive to many people. There's also a lot more Skype-enabled handsets around these days which means you don't have to be tethered to your computer to talk.

But I just wonder how quickly we've been taking up this new technology. Is price alone going to cause us to ditch our landlines or is this type of service still pretty scratchy and unreliable?

Thanks to Dr Tim Aubrey, Dr David Davis and Mr Alex Gibson, of UTS' engineering department, I had the chance to play with one of the $US150 laptops this week and am absolutely amazed at the features the OLPC group were able to pack in while still maintaining such a low price.

Now that everyone has had the chance to digest Apple's iPhone announcement and its feature list, the hype is dying down and the picture of exactly what the phone can and can't do is becoming clearer.

You've already read all of the gushing reports outlining the iPhone's benefits - if not, a run-down of the main features is in the above-linked news story - so here's a list of iPhone features that aren't so crash hot.

Apple's new iPhone - unveiled overnight - won't be available in Australia until 2008. But that won't stop a lot of people poring over reports about the new gadget, studying the specs and counting down the days until it makes its local debut.

No local pricing details yet, but in the US the 4GB model will sell for $US499 and the 8GB will retail for $US599. That's $A640 and $A770 based on current exchange rates. A 4GB Nano sells here for $A299 and the 8GB model goes for $A380. So Apple's effectively doubling the price of the unit - for which you'll also get a phone, camera and browser.

Ailin and Guntram Graef have been trail blazers in the emerging business of virtual real estate. Starting from scratch, the husband and wife team behind Anshe Chung Studios have built a profitable business inside the virtual world of Second Life buying land, developing it and selling it to others who frequent this much-hyped metauniverse.

If you study usability for long, you soon come across a wonderful graph that succinctly explains why technology makes our lives more complex. One axis shows complexity; the other shows time. It's a concept worth pondering at the start of a new year, when we might well aim for simplifying our lives, and one that came back to me this week as I sought a new remote control for my TV.

It's either a cliche or a tradition - can't remember which - but we're going to kick off the new year with a look at what we think is going to make waves in 2007.

We've compiled a list of tech trends that we think will take off in the coming year. The list is very much a work in progress and, as with any sort of prediction, opinions will inevitably vary. So your views/comments are welcome.

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